Port Trakl

Book excerpt: Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Borzutzky. First introduced to a U.S. audience by Cecilia Vicuna in 4 Mapuche Poets, Jaime Luis Huenun has become best-known through Daniel Borzutzky's vivid, memorable translations. In these recent poems--published in 2001 in Chile--Huenun invents a setting influenced by Melville's vivid scenarios, Coleridge's languid morbidity, andGeorge Trakl's silences and darkening seas. Borzutzky's English version is as haunted, brooding, and terrific as the original--Forrest Gander. PORT TRAKL is a world whose characters do not know which world they belong to, and which world they want to belong to; and as they attempt to depart one state of exile and enter into another, we get the sense that they will always be caught between worlds: between the real and the imaginary, between speech and silence, between poetry and the impossibility of hope--Daniel Borzutzky.